BlueData EPIC Software Platform on AWS for Enterprise Is Here

BlueData has released the enterprise edition of its BlueData EPIC software platform on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and other public clouds in the coming months including Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

BlueData facilitates the deployment of Big Data infrastructure and applications, leveraging embedded Docker container technology. The BlueData EPIC software platform provides a self-service Big-Data-as-a-Service (BDaaS) experience with security and performance for Big Data analytics. BlueData has offered a free community edition of BlueData EPIC running on AWS since last year; but until now, BlueData’s enterprise edition was available only for on-premises deployments.

The benefits of the BlueData EPIC software platform for cloud deployments include:

- Consistent user experience: BlueData will offer a unified Big-Data-as-a-Service software platform for hybrid (on-premises and cloud) and multi-cloud (e.g. AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform) deployments. End users and administrators will have a “single pane of glass” for creating and managing Big Data environments; and the Docker images for Hadoop, Spark, and other Big Data applications will be the same irrespective of the underlying infrastructure or cloud service.

- Greater flexibility and choice: BlueData provides the ability to create unique BDaaS environments – with preferred Big Data platforms (and versions) and applications, either commercial or open source. It facilities multiple environments for different use cases, for different user groups, and for dev/test/QA or production. It also offers the flexibility to update Big Data distributions and applications on a user’s timeline, not the timeline of the cloud service provider.

Eliminate data movement: BlueData enables users to tap into both cloud-based data stores (such as Amazon S3) as well as on-premises data for analytics with Hadoop and Spark. This allows the ability to leverage the elastic compute of the public cloud while keeping data on-premises – avoiding the cost and complexity of duplicating, copying, and transferring data to the cloud service.

The BlueData EPIC software platform will be licensed for public cloud services with either usage-based pricing or an annual subscription price.

BlueData also has introduced the summer release of its BlueData EPIC software platform. Highlights of this new release include:

- One-click install for pre-configured Docker images: Several Big Data distributions and applications come pre-configured as Docker images in the BlueData EPIC “App Store” and can be installed via one-click deployment. The new release provides reference images for recent versions of Hadoop distributions such as Cloudera’s CDH 5.5.1 and CDH 5.7, Hortonworks’ HDP 2.4 with Ambari 2.2, and MapR 5.1. Other updates to the App Store include Spark 1.6 standalone as well as recent releases for other common frameworks and applications such as Cassandra 2.1, Kafka 0.9, and Splunk Enterprise 6.3.

“Bring your own App” for flexibility and choice: BlueData ensures compatibility with a broad ecosystem of Big Data frameworks and applications. However, most enterprises have specific and unique requirements to make Big Data environments comply with their internal standards. There are often different tools required for different user groups or different use cases. And these users often want the latest versions of their preferred tools. To meet these needs, BlueData has extended its App Workbench functionality to allow administers to modify and update the pre-configured Docker images in their App Store – or create new images for other applications and tools.